Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> On Wed, 1 Aug 2007, Andy Green wrote:
>
>> Somebody in the thread at some point said:
>>
>>> however, when i go to "System" -> "Administration" -> "Network", there
>>> is no entry for wireless and, if i select that i want to add one, the
>>> only choice i'm given is "Other wireless card". i would have thought
>>> i would be shown the internal broadcom device. am i already confused
>>> by what i should be seeing here?
>> If you do an
>>
>> iwconfig
>>
>> you should see wlan0 listed if all is well. But probably nothing
>> will be well unless you have the righteous firmware in /lib/firmware
>> already.
>
> right now, i'm doing a fresh install on that laptop, and i'm going to
> carefully document what the state of the world is starting there.
> first question -- do i need to be running NetworkManager? that's a
> new service for me, is it necessary or can i ignore it for now?
Yes you can ignore it. When everything settles down, including the
wireless drivers themselves, it will allow nice high level decisions
about network connections, at the moment unless you have the right
drivers it is just an annoyance.
The methods I propose here are pretty low level commandline stuff, but
work on all the wireless devices I met.
> also, what should i document when that system comes up? as a prelim
> list:
>
> - any references to wireless in dmesg/messages
> - output of "iwconfig"
> - what shows up in the "Network" admin client
> - contents of /lib/firmware related to wireless
Yes first check dmesg to see the firmware went in and so on.
The next move is to get the AP authentication working with wireless,
only then do you worry about setting it up as a network interface with
system-config-network. So you need to be aware of the encryption on the AP.
- check you have a wireless interface: iwconfig
- bring it up: ifconfig wlan0 up
- look around: iwlist wlan0 scan
- AP == no encryption --> iwconfig wlan0 channel <n> ; iwconfig wlan0
ap 11:11:11:11:11:11 (<-- AP Mac)
- AP == WEP --> set it up from iwconfig enc <key> ; then as unencrypted
- AP == WPA --> configure wpa_supplicant.
1) wpa_passphrase <SSID> >/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
(type the shared secret and enter)
<SSID> is your AP name
2) edit /etc/sysconfig/wpa_supplicant to say something like
INTERFACES="-iwlan0"
DRIVERS="-Dwext"
3) chkconfig wpa_supplicant on
4) mv /etc/rc3.d/S12wpa_supplicant /etc/rc3.d/S09wpa_supplicant
mv /etc/rc5.d/S12wpa_supplicant /etc/rc5.d/S09wpa_supplicant
(works around an initscript bug that tries to get DHCP before
wpa_supplicant is started during boot)
5) service wpa_supplicant restart
If WPA is working, iwconfig will show something like this
wlan0 IEEE 802.11g ESSID:"froh"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:11:50:AD:CE:38
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr=2346 B
Encryption
key:87FC-2359-DC58-434A-3939-7271-4DD2-1178-52FB-B957-221B-4295-1A52-B948-D682-5787
[2]
Link Quality=85/100 Signal level=-23 dBm Noise level=-58 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
Specifically the Encryption key stuff will be present.
- see how you are doing with association: iwconfig will have the AP MAC
and SSID (AP name) if you are associated.
- Give it a test IP by hand, something like
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.0.123 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
route add default gw 192.168.0.1
- can we ping anything?
-Andy
